By Richard Odell Some among us get trees like a disease. Big boys are especially prone, but big girls get it too, sometimes. The psychosis might simmer for years, before it really starts to roil. I’d always been a plant guy, and I liked trees well enough. Wanted to see more of them, hated to…
By Richard Odell Identifying points of origin is like picking up ice cream with one’s fingers. One never gets all of it. It might be said, however, the Farmers’ Market we have today began with some now forgotten young man selling oranges by the drop-off box at the post office. This marketing genius was soon…
By Richard Odell We know them mostly by their strange profile, if we know them at all, rising singly, here and there, above the dense skylines of Douglas Firs, their rounded, shaggy heads in contrast to the pointed spires of their surrounding neighbors. They are the rare and “true” firs, Abies grandis, of Vashon-Maury. A…
Tige and Daisy Leamer outside Leamer’s Shopping CenterCourtesy of Candace BrownPhotographer: Howard Willsie By Richard Odell Did I imagine Daisy’s? My father liked to circulate. He had me in tow, at age three or four, deep in the 1950s. I remember an interior scene where today is Minglement. The presence of several adults, their voices…
By Richard Odell I’ve always associated the 1940s with the color blue. Why, I don’t know. The 1930s I’ve seen always as dull green. Picture books, maybe, dated objects, impressed indelibly the child’s perception. That I associate the 1950s with black and white seems obvious enough, for the greater world first came to this child’s…